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Pyramids & Techies

If your a typical person, you probably don’t think about pyramids very much. If they enter your consciousness at all, it’s probably because click bait crosses your screen having to do with how aliens built them or other such nonsense. However, there is a small band of techies who think about pyramids all of the time, and they apply their considerable knowledge and skills to the subject in a variety of cool ways.

For example, an archaeologist named Mark Lehner and his team at the The Giza Mapping Project have been in the news a lot lately because of their huge advance in understanding who built the Great Pyramid of Giza (Wikipedia), and more importantly, how they did it. This video and an article from Newsweek explains how the team found an awesome ancient text that describes how an “overseer” named Merer lead a team that dug huge canals to channel water from the Nile to the pyramid in order to move the stones there. Thanks to the knowledge they gained from the text, Mark Lehner’s team also found a hidden system of waterworks under the Giza Plateau that supports the new knowledge about how the pyramids were built.

This is just the latest development in a long line of research that has led to a fairly robust understanding of how humans, not aliens, engineered and built the pyramids. Another example is how a team from the University of Amsterdam made news back in 2014 when they published a study about how the ancient Egyptians were able to use water to move the huge stones that make up the pyramids. Here’s a video and the articles about that find.

There are plenty of other examples of work that has gone into understanding how the pyramids were built, and here are a couple of short videos from PBS and a couple of articles from the BBC and Wikipedia that summarize what is known.